Mrs. Pauline Manford is a busy woman, as any upstanding New York society lady should be.
Parties, dinners, charity luncheons, balls, and strict exercise and beauty regimes fill her daily schedule to an exhausting degree. Her secretary can hardly keep up. To manage a modern household is to hold the family together, staying on trend with all things helpful, but her daughter has horrible taste in married men, her ex-husband is unwell, and her son is struggling to forge a career for himself while his postpartum wife refuses to settle down from lavish partying. Pauline can’t decide if she should bob her hair, redecorate, or get a face lift, and she surely doesn’t have time to notice her current husband’s wandering eye as anything other than harmless flirtations.
When a rakish Italian actor bound for Hollywood and a scandal with the local wellness guru threaten to tear her perfectly constructed life apart, Pauline moves on to new spiritually medicinal treatments, and the Manfords must navigate the fraught tensions that bind them together. Hopefully a vacation from NYC’s ruthless grind to their quiet country house will deter any further worries. Twilight Sleep (1927), named for the early anesthetic that predates epidural and induces memory loss, is Edith Wharton’s oft-forgotten novel of modern motherhood and the pressures that lead women to reconstruct or completely escape their lives. Sharp and humorous, it feels as relevant today as it did in the 1920s.
A propos de l’auteur
Allison Miriam Smith is a co-founder of Smith & Taylor Classics. She is also an Acquiring Editor and Publishing & Publicity Manager for Unnamed Press. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California where she was an assistant curator for the USC Doheny Library George Cassady Lewis Carroll Special Collection. She later went on to earn a Masters in 18th & 19th c. Literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, working nights at the library. Before Unnamed Press, she was a bookseller at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, CA.
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